


like swimming

by jonphaedrus



Category: SANDERSON Brandon - Works, Steelheart - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: F/M, Gen, Graphic Description, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-23
Updated: 2014-03-23
Packaged: 2018-01-16 19:06:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1358530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonphaedrus/pseuds/jonphaedrus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s died a lot of times.</p>
            </blockquote>





	like swimming

**Author's Note:**

> Note: this has INTENSE spoilers up until the very end of Steelheart (none for Mitosis). So don't read it if you haven't finished the book basically.

He’s died a lot of times.

The first time he died was two weeks after the fiasco at his school—a bottle of pills and a locked bathroom door and he slid down into it to hear fists pounding against the wood and her voice screaming his name over and over, desperately shaking the doorknob, trying to get it open.

He woke up in her arms, ten minutes later (it always takes ten minutes, ten minutes for his body to detox, for his heart to start beating again, for his brain to regain blood and oxygen) as she held his shoulders, kept shaking him, screaming his name and crying, her tears wet on his cheeks, and her begging, begging, begging for him to wake up.

He hadn’t wanted to, but he had.

 

 

 

The second time he died was six months after he’d found the classroom full of dead bodies and the blood all over his hands. They were practically throwing guns at people by then, _take one and keep yourself safe_ said the authorities, before _keeping yourself safe_ was something that you couldn’t do, and everyone had to have a gun.

He put the barrel in his mouth and left a splatter across the back wall of the garage.

She didn’t find him that time, but he woke up slumped on the ground with a pounding headache and a cramp in his neck and a bullet that fell out of the back of his skull. He’d never forgotten the oxide taste of the barrel and the burning scent of the gunpowder that had filled his jaw and his nostrils, still smelled it every single time he fired a gun to save someone who couldn’t come back from dying like it was as simple as waking up in the morning.

He tried to wash the blood off of the wall, but she’d seen it anyway. 

That was the first time she almost left him, but not the last.

 

 

 

The third time was when he’d gotten cocky, angry and cocky and with too much power and anger stored up inside his blood and his bones—before she got shot in the stomach and he found out that he could fill her with his gift, to keep the light from seeping out of her brown, brown eyes.

The other Epic had offensive powers, not defensive ones. He was crushed under a bus, and woke up choking and unable to breathe with too much weight on his recently-crushed ribs. It wasn’t strange or scary any more—it was like surfacing from diving too deep with too much pressure.

He erupted out of the bus in a shower of dust. It was his first kill—offensive strength was nothing without what a kid would go in, ten years later, to call _prime invincibility._  

He broke the Epic’s neck. It was the first time he’d killed someone and not wanted to kill himself for it.

 

 

 

The fourth, fifth, and sixth times were early on in the Reckoners. Before they’d started to research weaknesses, before they’d started to plan, before the name of _Jonathan Phaedrus_ was whispered in the dark by scared Epics who looked over their shoulders. When he was still scared of dying, before he realised that death happened to everyone else, but never to him.

You couldn’t save everyone, and you especially couldn’t save the humans who were too weak and too stupid to know better.

He sacrificed himself thrice for their original members. All of them later died, lost to the Epics they tried to kill without him. He brushed off the injuries—hit by a rocket, barely missed (no, it had exploded in his chest and he’d woken up to wretch over the sight of what had used to be his chest on the ground next to him, exploded guts and gore replaced by newly-grown organs), a bullet to the heart (hit my shoulder, I’ll survive), beheading (I rolled out of the way, no, you didn’t see my head there on the ground, eyes staring sightlessly).

 

 

 

He died other times. All the different ways imaginable. He had to stop being reckless—people got suspicious when he was reckless. He sent people to die, and shut off his eyes and closed down his heart, stopped thinking about the way they would scream over their mobiles in the last few moments.

He couldn’t tell them that death was just silence and darkness and deep, deep swimming. He’d seen the other side so many times it didn’t really matter. If he had a weakness (he must) he didn’t know it. It wasn’t death.

Death was just another obstacle between him and a sea of dead Epics and the whispered name of _Jonathan Phaedrus_ and the hope of millions.

They started following him, and started dying for him.

He missed when he’d died for them, instead. That was so much easier.

 

 

 

For years he didn’t die. He was too good to throw into the field. He’d learned everything he knew the hard way—the trial and error way that nobody else could. He’d died for his mistakes, and then gotten back up, lamented his ruined clothes, stopped getting sick over finding another part of his body removed and regrown.

Instead, he planned. Learned from his mistakes, and made sure those that couldn’t get back up and keep on walking with a crushed skull didn’t make them. Saved lives. Killed dozens to save thousands.

And then, in an empty field covered in gunfire with a teenage boy and the most dangerous man he’d ever stared down ( _scared_ , he was _scared_ , not of death no never of death but scared of what might happen if he _failed—_ ) and he watched Steelheart fly up into the air, and for a moment, was terrified.

He wasn’t the only one that was going to die when that fist fell.

He would have killed two innocent young people who had only wanted to see an evil regime fall. He’d have likely killed the one person he ever cared about. Would she come back for him? No, she couldn’t, he wouldn’t have let her—

Steelheart’s fist hit his head. 

It was like swimming deep, deeper, deepest. He never even felt the second strike, dead instantly.

 

 

 

Ten minutes to the second. Always.

Just enough time to save the one boy who he’d ever cared about enough to call _son._

 


End file.
